


Under Different Stars

by tekhnicolor



Series: The Universe Next Door [1]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-05
Updated: 2015-03-05
Packaged: 2018-03-16 10:34:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3485039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tekhnicolor/pseuds/tekhnicolor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's not really much plot here. Just my imaginings of what some of the moments between Rose and TenToo would be like post Journey's End. A bit slow-moving. There's a really fun metaphor in here somewhere though, if you're looking. One shot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Under Different Stars

You're a different man now. She knows.

She knows by the way you sit outside each night, fall asleep to the heartbeats of the stars instead of hers. You lean back on the chair made for two and it swings faintly as you settle into it. When you close your eyes, you can feel the growing pains of this new universe, hear the creaking of its doors as the night grows quiet. It is taking a breath now, inhaling and exhaling. It is not used to your being here.

Your bones shake under the movement of these new stars, taking them in, adjusting to them, letting the starlight slip back into your body as it once had. You gasp at the unfamiliar sensation, at how it feels different to the point of pain. How uncomfortable it is, how unfair. You don't fit, this universe and you, not without it breaking you a little. And it does. The light seeps through the cracks in your skin and spills into your chest, rising slowly from your lungs to the back of your throat to the spaces between your teeth. The journey is languid; there is time for that now.

There are so many missing things. A gentle pounding in the right side of your chest. The feel of the Earth rushing beneath you. A tirelessness. A comforting hum that should be there but isn't. The noise of a thousand worlds. A golden glow, lost somewhere in the bowels of an ancient ship. A litany of tomorrow's you will never have. Not anymore.

You will always be the same, but this is changing you. Every bone in your body is being broken and remade, shattered and rammed together again, welded unevenly into place. You rub your eyes with the heels of your palms, grit your teeth until the pain subsides enough that you can pretend it isn't there. It's like being stripped apart thread by thread and rewoven, respun out into time. You remember this. The dark days. A House that was not a home. Namelessness and nakedness. Suicide and sacrifice. Rebirth. You are being remade to fit this universe. It feels like a shadow of a time, once, so long ago. It feels like regeneration. It feels like dying.

You think for a moment that you could stop it, could refuse to adapt to this new world, but you do nothing. You let it take you piece by piece until you belong here. It touches your lips and breathes life against them, forces it down your throat. Dying would be so easy, but you live.

These are not your stars, this is not your sky. It is colder, this time.

But she is there at your midnight hour. It is different for her too. She fell in love with you in another life, in the last universe, in the one you called home. You have always loved her and if she loves you still, you might be able to bear this new world. You might even grow to love it.

The chair whines and swings again lightly. A lazy wind wakes and stirs, and it is a caress amid the stars. When you turn your head like clockwork, she is kissing the corner of your mouth. You have bravery enough to bring her gently to you, to settle her body against your own as you had settled against the swing. The rhythm to this universe is not the same, but it is not bad either.

"I will find you new stars," is what she says. It is a whisper tossed into the abyss and it reaches you.

This is what saves you.

Letting her head rest against your chest, you hold her tighter to you. She is so afraid she has disrupted you, that under this sky you dream only of turning Time's dials backwards. But you don’t really want the past anymore.

She is crying now. But you hold her because for the first time in all your lives, for the first time in any universe and under any sky, you can. She is small in your arms and it is the courage of her tears that warms the starlight in your bones and carries you the rest of the way home. When her palm settles above your heart, you think it will hurt but it doesn't. Because against the plane of your chest, where you expect to feel only the weak flutter of one heartbeat, instead you feel two. The faint measure of your own and the steady pulse at her wrist. A cadence so familiar it aches. This is how it is supposed to be. This is how it is always supposed to be. Perhaps three is too much for these universes. Perhaps you have to give up one to get another. And perhaps this is the way of beautiful things.

Two is beautiful and one day you might find a universe where three is just right.

The stars above your head shimmer. They are waiting, you understand. The night is young and so are you, this time, and this is the best adventure. It is it is it is. You kiss her when she tilts her head to look at you. You have kissed her before, but these kisses are different. Her hair is silk ribbon against the cool of your hands. She tastes like strawberries on your tongue. You love her. You will love her in every life.

"Shh. Love, shh," you tell her, twine your fingers through hers because that is what you do. That is how you survive. "We’ll find them together," you say. "Better with two, remember.”

A pause.

“Do you love me?” Your voice sounds ghost-like, too vulnerable, but you have to get the words out, have to know.

“Yes.” She answers so quickly you think she must not understand. 

“No, I mean _me._ Do you love me"—and you press her hand against your chest, to the side with no heart—"like this?” You are quiet beneath her palm, empty.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“You’re still you.”

“I’m still me.” You are.

You feel gooseflesh begin to appear as she slides her hand across your chest, as she stops it just over the place where your lonely heart beats. You let out a slow breath of air against her temple.

“It’s the same,” she says.

“What?”

“As mine.”

“Oh.”

There’s another drawn-out moment of silence between you before she speaks.

“I don’t care how fast your heart beats,” she says, with a finality so admirable it nearly breaks you. “I just care that it does.”

You curl your fingers between hers almost involuntarily. And in that moment, you don’t know what to say. Because you could have fallen in love with anyone. You could have fallen in love with someone who would never love you back, or with someone who would never love you in the right way, never with everything they have and never without conditions. You could have fallen in love with someone who would never love you enough to keep holding onto you, especially not after discovering that your life would inevitably be the most tragically complicated life in the universe, someone who would let you go, give up on you, eventually. 

You could have fallen in love with someone who would never chase you when you run away.

But you didn’t. You fell in love with her. And maybe it was always meant to be that way, and maybe you were always meant to find her. Maybe this was inevitable; maybe you _couldn’t_ have fallen in love with anyone else. 

But you know better than anyone that it isn’t every day you find a love as persistent as the stars.

Your hands flutter over her hips before settling there solidly, the curve of her bones fitting perfectly to your touch. And in the growing moonlight, you pull her to your body and kiss her. It’s different than the last time you kissed her, than the first time, than any time before. It hurts. It _aches._ It’s such a pretty pain. You can see everything. There’s Gallifrey, the panicked pleas of women and screams of men, the strangled cries of 2.47 _billion_ pairs of small hearts being ripped from the universe. There’s Gallifrey, burning, the torch at your feet, the blood on your hands. There’s your shadow, stealing away from the destruction like a wraith. There are your years spent in the void, hollow and lifeless and if you hadn’t been so afraid of pain you would have cut yourself open in the darkness. Bled until you ran out of lives, out of chances. And your fingers on her hips will leave bruises in the morning, because this is something you don’t know, something you don’t understand, something that terrifies you but you need it – need _her_ – like you need oxygen, gasping and breathless and the only thing you know how to be is desperate.

She strangles a gasp against your mouth, and you feel her hands hotter than coals on your chest, your jaw, the back of your neck, before she tugs on your hair and it’s your turn to feel your breath catch in your throat. Drawing one of your hands slowly up the length of her body, you can feel individually every single neurotransmitter and human hormone that rushes through you. Endorphins. Dopamine. Oxytocin. Serotonin. Adrenaline. You can feel the exact rate at which your single heart increases, your mind drawing the slope of a graph instinctively, the dilation of your blood vessels; you can smell vanilla and strawberries and something so distinctly _her_ it makes your heart stutter that you can make it out, that you know her well enough to know even the tiniest details. That she’s let you near enough to her. And it’s exhilarating that there is still so much to learn.

When your mouths part finally for air, you stare at each other for a long time in the dark, watching the other’s eyes as your breaths even out. Your only lights are a pale white from the moon and a sliver of flickering golds and oranges from indoors cast across the floor behind her. There’s no sound, no noise, it is perfect silence, and yet you swear you can hear a music, a mechanical chiming from somewhere above you that reminds you suddenly that the Music of the Spheres exists in this universe too. That it’s different, but the same. That you are different, but the same. You can love her better this time. You reach forward tentatively with a hand and draw a line from the temple of her face to her chin, hold her there gently, brushing your thumb across her bottom lip. And you lean in, parting your lips to kiss her again before stopping yourself halfway and dropping your hand to find hers. 

“I love you,” you tell her once your fingers find hers again, and you mean it just as much as you have always meant it.

She tilts your chin up to meet her eyes. “Quite right too,” she says softly, and you shake your head and chuckle a little.

“Not my best line,” you admit. She laughs, and it’s perfect.

She raises an eyebrow, letting her hand fall to your shoulder. “A machine that goes ding when there’s stuff?” You open your mouth to protest, then close it and resort to raising a suspicious eyebrow at her and tugging at your earlobe. She hadn’t been there when you’d said that, not that you remember.

“Yeah, Martha told me about that one,” she goes on, before you have the chance to voice any of your thoughts. “She _was_ good.”

You laugh again. “They all were.”

You swallow. Her fingers are plucking the material of your white shirt at your shoulder. There’s something in the air, something that is both frightening and beautiful at the same time. 

Her hand on your shoulder steadies you, gives you confidence, but you still feel the nerves in every part of your body and even a foot of space between you is too much for comfort. It could have been universes. It _had_ been universes. Memories of being unable to sleep for weeks flood your mind, of venturing to a room so deep in the TARDIS to weep, your ship growing worried as even its soothing hum did nothing to stave away the pain. Your normal body temperature is higher now that you are part human, but just now you feel so cold. 

You say nothing else, and she seems to recognize the darkening of your eyes. She leans in, pushing gently on your shoulder to lift herself higher, and the large swinging chair wobbles a little and creaks. She places a lingering kiss on your forehead, and as she does you wind an arm behind her and lean in until she’s lowered onto her back on the cushions of the chair and you have moved your body over hers. It’s such a strange sensation, to watch the pale moonlight ripple across her face and to hold her beneath you, to wind your legs through hers and your fingers through tangles of gold. And to just lie with her. To simply be close to her, intertwined with her, the way you believe your timelines must be. You meet her eyes, and they’re watching you, just … watching you. And suddenly you don’t know what to do. Don’t know if she wants this, if she’s ready for this, if _this_ is even a thing you are allowed to contemplate. You think it will be alright if it isn’t. It will be. Not ideal, but alright. You can still hold her hand and run with her and listen to her stories and tell her your own – all the things you have spent so long doing anyway. Nevertheless, that doesn't keep you from feeling so very … _human,_ being this close to her. 

“I love you too." Her voice is quiet.

You laugh. “I know. You told me.”

“Well I’m tellin’ you again, you ungrateful alien.” She smiles one of those smiles that has her tongue poking out between her teeth and you can’t be blamed if your eyes flick to her mouth. But her next words are more solemn. “I really will find you new stars, you know.” She reaches a hand to the side of your head, smooths her palm down to your sideburn and brushes her thumb over it. It’s such a tender caress, and your eyelids flutter involuntarily.

“I’m serious,” she goes on, and her face adopts a grave sincerity, though there is a playfulness behind the expression. “S'all waiting out there. And it’s brand new, to you. This planet, all it’s creatures and horizons – you haven’t seen them yet. Not with these eyes.” Her finger traces your eyebrow and around to the apple of your cheek; her own eyes sparkle in the darkness. You don’t even try to stop the shiver that takes your body then, only press yourself closer to her with a grateful hum because her touch makes you feel loved. The words are achingly familiar, from so long ago, another time, another world, another life. 

She slips her hand behind your neck and pulls your mouth to hers.

“And it is gonna be …” She kisses you, and her final word is a whisper you swallow the very _nanosecond_ it leaves her lips.

“Fantastic.”

In the end, that’s what does you.

Because there are so many missing things. A gentle pounding in the right side of your chest. The feel of the Earth rushing beneath you. A tirelessness. A comforting hum that should be there but isn't. The noise of a thousand worlds. A golden glow, lost somewhere in the bowels of an ancient ship. A litany of tomorrow's you won't ever have. Not anymore.

But she is with you. And she is _better._ And you wouldn’t trade her for the wide world.

~oOo~

About three and a half minutes later, Rose isn’t sure what’s happening or how it began or where it will end (well, she does have some faint idea, a mere guess really), but suddenly he’s on his feet and she’s stumbling against him in the dark. The living room is quiet, the fire already alive and dancing among their shadows, the lights out.

He trips over the table and she trips over him and they both end up laughing on the couch and he swears that someone has moved the furniture on purpose but she claims she doesn’t mind. And she’s lying beneath him now, again, her face just inches from his, so close they must be sharing the same air. There’s a short moment of stillness, and then his hands ghost across her sides, memorizing the curves of her body. His thumbs loop beneath the waistline of her jeans and pull her closer to him. She’s lost her shirt somehow. He’s lost that obstruction of a coat. Her hands undo his tie, slipping it slowly from his neck as she savors the soft sound of fabric running across fabric, and then discarding it. She pushes back the lapels of his jacket, hesitantly at first, and then hurriedly and then finally, _finally,_ he dips his head and kisses her, and perhaps for the first time in her life she feels that there is something in the universe besides air and food and water that she needs and it is _him._

“Rose Tyler,” he gulps for air, letting his head fall against her shoulder, but she can feel him smile against it and she knows there is a manic grin plastered to his face that would likely do things to her insides.

He pulls back a moment later onto his elbows, and she grows nervous. How he manages to make her feel like a little girl again is disconcerting, but there it is. She will understand if he is having second thoughts. This new life they are living is not easy to adjust to, and he’s told her something rather complicated before about this universe having to adjust to him being here. Maybe that was the case now?

“You know, we don’t–“ She moves to reach for her shirt but his hand catches hers from the air.

“Don’t,” he says. He takes her hand, moves it back into the space between them, lays it onto her chest. He lowers himself carefully back to her. “Don’t.”

And she knows then that he does want this, and that gives her courage.

He watches her face, the dim lights from the fireplace casting strange shadows across his features. His eyes are dark; the manic grin is gone now. His shirt is unbuttoned but still hangs open over his frame. She runs her hands under the fabric above his shoulders, scratches her nails lightly across his chest. The sighs that escape his lips are the sweetest music, and it's so beautiful and different to see him this way, calm and quiet and _still._ She will listen to him forever if she can. When her hand stops to rest over his heart and she feels the unfamiliar and yet so very familiar cadence, she closes her eyes and exhales, content to be with him. Really, before anything else, she just wants to exist with him. To occupy the same space as him, be a part of whatever world he is a part of. She would have followed him anywhere just to keep the company of his shadow. Better to be an afterthought than nothing at all. Even if it hurt. 

But she _isn’t,_ and it _doesn’t,_ and here they are, now, and he is broken and fragile and a stranger in this world, but though he is strange and untethered and always being tugged by the universe in a thousand different directions, he is so very _hers._

She kisses his lips. Once, twice. He sighs into her mouth. She will take care of him. 

_I will follow behind you and pick up your pieces, if that is what it takes to show you that you are so desperately loved._ She knows they aren't linked telepathically – at least she thinks she knows – but when he hums and drags his nose across her cheek and kisses her jawline, she can’t help but think that he heard her, somehow. 

“You are the _best_ thing,” she tells him, because it seems imperative that he know. 

“Hmm?” 

She shudders as one of his hands makes a slow journey up the side of her leg and across her waist and ribcage. “I know I haven’t met as many people–“ Inhales sharply as he nips at her neck. “As you have. Or been to as many places. But out of all … out of all of them, you are the best.”

He pulls back then, and she whines a little and shifts beneath his wiry frame, eliciting a stifled groan from him. “What?”

“You are the best thing,” she says. “Out of all the things.” And she smiles at him proudly.

“Mm.” He seems to contemplate the idea, tilting his head to the side and squinting at her face. Then he grins again, a lazy, slow grin that reveals all his laughter lines and means something clever or mischievous has just manifested itself in that curious mind of his. So she waits for the punchline.

But all he says – cockily and with a lift of his chin – is, “Thank you, Rose Tyler.” 

And then she gasps, feeling light fingers suddenly dancing down her sternum. He might be cocky, but his hands are tentative still, careful, a little scared even, and it breaks her heart, seeing him that way.

She knows from his next words that he is holding himself back. “Are you alright?” he asks, fluttering fingers across her ribcage. And perhaps with good reason. This world is different. They are different too, now. Still the same, but different. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which things have changed and which haven’t.

“Yes.” This is not one of the things which has changed. Not this love. Not ever. He will never lose this love.

“Are you alright?” she echoes him, just to be sure.

“Oh yes.”

This silence is the heaviest, and it seems to last a lifetime.

The fire crackles, they breathe into the narrow space between them; his face is so close, his body even closer, all gangly limbs and angles and still half clothed, which is really rather unfortunate now that she considers it. But just outside the door lies a canopy of stars above their heads and a light that reaches them from billions of miles away, and she knows with absolute certainty that those stars are _their_ stars. That this is their world. Right now, today, for this lifetime, this slice of time and space belongs to them. And no matter how often he babbles about atoms and emptiness and the end of all things, she looks at those stars and she is convinced that there is something else. That there is more to life than time and space. That some things, like love, exist outside of them and so cannot be bound by them. That just as light lives on long after its source has died, love lives on. That there is _something_ more. And that that something will keep them together.

She thinks of her other Doctor, the man amongst a different set of stars, and she knows the aching in her chest when she remembers him will never really go away. She hopes he knows that she loves him. She hopes that that love will carry him through his darkest nights. But more than anything, she hopes that he isn't alone. She hopes that he finds a family, maybe someone ginger like Donna for him to be jealous of, that he runs a lot and laughs a lot and makes new friends who remind him every day of how special he is. And she knows he misses her. Her half-human Doctor has told her he does. Told her also that the universe is strange and surprising and that the Doctor and Rose Tyler are two events in time and space that goodbye cannot ever touch for long.

She’s not quite sure what they are, but it’s beautiful. 

Finally she takes his hand in hers, laces her fingers through his long, elegant ones, and squeezes lightly. Because that is what they do. That is how they survive.

“Here you go,” she says.

He looks down at their hands, then back up at her, confusion decorating his fire-lit features.

"A hand to hold," she explains. 

And that’s all he needs to dissipate the fear. His hands find her waist and then clothes are being disposed of, buttons undone, straps unstrapped. His skin is cool against hers and she marvels at the unfamiliarity of seeing him this way. His hands wander; she rakes hers through his hair.

“Maybe we should find out if I really _am_ the best.” The way his lips curl against her skin feels right. “In all areas. You know, just to be absolutely certain.” 

Ah. She rolls her eyes, giggles into his shoulder. There was his punchline.

And then the lights flicker, he finds her lips. And it is perfect, the way their bodies fit together seamlessly, the way the fire dances and his name escapes her lips every so often, the way his muscles strain and her breath comes in small gasps, the way he knows — even in the dark — the precise shape of her body, the way the only sounds she can hear are the crackling of fire and a gentle hum in her head and the words falling from his lips, the way he holds her as though there is magic in her bones that needs safekeeping, the way his head arches back and the way — when it is over — he lets it fall against her shoulder for one last time.

She stays awake, whispering about old memories and combing her fingers through his hair as he lays his head on her chest, until his breathing has slowed and she is sure he has fallen asleep. He's so beautiful like this, open and vulnerable and completely trusting, motionless save for the steady rise and fall of his chest. It's a whole other side to him she has only ever seen glimpses of, hidden beneath layers of clothing and endless babble. And she knows in the morning he'll be running about again, all excited energy and tousled hair and he won't be able to sit still for more than two minutes while he rambles on about the complexities of the planet Althrace's dependence on a white hole and what kind of consequences there would have been if he had gone through with his intentions to introduce bananas to some galaxy which apparently has never heard of them and has therefore been grievously deprived. She knows in the morning he'll be wearing a hundred layers of clothes again and he'll be extra charismatic and extra impressive to make up for the fact that he's still frightened by this new life. She knows he'll be nervous talking about this and so will probably avoid the topic altogether. Which is alright. They have time now.

They have so much time and it feels like electricity is running through her body and her stomach is tied up in knots. The feeling people get when they know something big is about to happen. Because yes, he will definitely be more guarded in the morning than he is now, but maybe he'll trail off once or twice in the middle of his ramblings when he meets her eyes, lose his train of thought a couple times because he can't stop thinking about her. Maybe he'll let her button his white Oxford for him and press a kiss to his collarbone, and maybe he'll bend his head a little so she can loop his tie around his neck. Maybe he'll come and find her when he's tired of being entertaining, or when something about his new human experience frustrates him, and maybe he'll talk to her just a tiny little bit about how he feels. Maybe, slowly, it will become easier for him to let himself be loved. 

She pulls the blanket up to cover his shoulders, smooths still-damp hair back into place and tries to make out the beat of his heart against her chest; and as her fingertips map out with dwindling speed the freckles on his back and she begins to feel his pale skin warm beneath her hands, she finally allows herself to join him in drifting off to sleep.

~oOo~

The universe goes quiet. Yet you know, instinctively, that all of its secret things have gathered in corners across time and space to discuss what will happen to them now, what to do about these strange and complicating events, about you and about her. To cast worried glances and guess about what you and she will do next. But you know. You already know. And you have known since the beginning of days.  
You will do what you have always done.

You will run, and you will shake the stars.

~oOo~

_Galaxies away is a man with two hearts and dreams that aren't really his. He looks back over his shoulder at a life he can never have, a life he will have._

_The Doctor and Rose Tyler.  
As it should be._

_There is a place for them somewhere, and one day he will get there. But for now, there is this._

_He turns into the night, the flapping of his coat an ancient echo, and the mist curls around him._


End file.
